California's Marijuana Legalization Initiative

California's marijuana legalization initiative is "horrible, awful, very bad no-good drug policy," said a leading marijuana expert who helped implement Washington state's legal market. That said, he'd vote for it, anyway.

Mark Kleiman, a professor of public policy at New York University, wrote this week that marijuana would become so inexpensive under California's proposed legalization ballot initiative, the Adult Use of Marijuana Act, that a dramatic rise in heavy marijuana use and marijuana-related disorders would be very possible ...

Kleiman comes at the issue from a data-driven public health perspective. He's less opposed to legalization per se than he is to the fully commercialized markets springing up in Colorado and elsewhere. He says that a truly ideal policy might look like what we currently have in Washington D.C., where growing and giving pot is legal but selling it is not. He points out that there are a host of other legalization options between prohibition and commercialization that policymakers could consider.